Success Story: Speed-up integration development by simulating Third-party system behaviour

[Martin Ivanov]

Intro

Integration development falls under the challenging (and this interesting!) areas of ServiceNow development. However, showstoppers often come into play, blocking the development process one way or another.

One may decide to be passive and wait for these to be resolved OR be proactive and ensure themselves all necessary prerequisites for smooth development. In this article, I am talking about the second option.

Setup

Put in simple words, the assignment was to build a searching tool that is using ServiceNow as place to submit your search request and get the results stored and displayed for further analysis.

The search itself happens in a third-party system, hosted in AWS. Both systems are talking to each other over REST messages.

The challenge

As it often happens, when multiple entities are involved in a process, one of them is blocking the others. In our case the third-party search engine was not ready at all. Estimated time for delivery at that point of time was few months, meaning I should wait for these months to pass and only then start the development of my part of the integration. Or not...

The solution

Curious how this this thing was going to work, I sat down with the project members on both sides and discussed the payload that was expected to be sent to ServiceNow once the third-party search tool was ready. We prepared an example JSON object, and my hands were untied.

I opened my ServiceNow PDI and created a Scripted REST API, which was basically returning the mentioned predefined response. Having a live endpoint, returning some predefined data, I was able to start building the REST API call, as well as the response parsing functionality. As a result, I had my part of the integration developed way before the third-party system deployment. And when the deployment finally happened, I just replaced the endpoints, configured the authentication and... Voila, everything worked in a plug-and-play fashion.

Conclusion

Be proactive. Do not complain. Rather think of how to make the things work for yourself. The world today, and especially ServiceNow provides endless possibilities. It is on you to take them over.

PS

If you'd like to know how I made this thing work 120 times faster compared to its initial setup, read this article as well. Feel free to go through all of my articles as well.

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Martin Ivanov
Community Rising Star 2022

[Matthew Brock]

Simple APIC Contract negotiation goes a long way decoupling to development teams during API development that is often skipped.   Agreeing on protocol(REST/SOAP/GraphQL/COM/JDBC/etc), documenting the endpoints(inputs, outputs, verbs, methods), authentication, and throttling rules not only ensures developers are on the same page, it provides a level of documentation most developers are accustomed to when working with a out-of-box API.  The creation of dummy endpoints and clients also helps with testing in future changes as you don't need to bring in integration team early.